The Vehement Flame eBook

Edith was willing enough to be quiet; “But,”
she added, practically, “would you mind giving
me the fifty cents now, Maurice? You always tear
off to Eleanor the minute you get home, and I’m
afraid you’ll forget it.”

He put his hand in his pocket and produced the half
dollar. “Anything to keep you still!”
he said.

“You don’t mind if I talk to Johnny?”

He didn’t answer; at that moment he was not
aware of her existence, still less Johnny’s,
for a frightful thought had stabbed him: Suppose
it wasn’t blackmail? Suppose Lily had told
the truth? Suppose “it” was his?
“She can’t prove it—­she can’t
prove it!” he said, aloud.

“Prove what? Who can’t?” Edith
said, interested.

Maurice didn’t hear her. Suddenly he felt
too sick to follow his own thought, and go to the
bottom of things; he was afraid to touch the bottom!
He made a desperate effort to keep on the surface of
his terror by saying: “It’s all Eleanor’s
fault. Damnation! Her idiotic jealousy drove
me out of the house that Sunday afternoon!”

At this moment Johnny Bennett and Edith broke into
shrieks of laughter. “Say, Maurice,”
Johnny began—­

“Can’t you children be quiet for five
minutes?” Maurice said. Johnny whistled
and, behind his spectacles, made big eyes at Edith.
“What’s he got on his little chest?”
Johnny inquired. But Maurice was deaf to sarcasm....
“It all goes back to Eleanor!”

Under the chatter of the other two, it was easier
to say this than to say, “Is Lily telling the
truth?” It was easier to hate Eleanor than to
think about Lily. And, hating, he said again,
aloud, the single agonized word.

Edith stood stock-still with amazement; she could
not believe her ears. Maurice had said—?
As for Maurice, his head bent as if he were walking
in a high wind he strode on, leaving her in the road
staring after him.

“Johnny!” said Edith; “did you hear?”

“That’s nothing,” Johnny said; “I
say it often, when mother ain’t round.
At least I say the first part.”

“Oh, Johnny!” Edith said, dismayed.

To Maurice, rushing on alone, the relief of hating
Eleanor was lost in the uprush of that ghastly possibility:
“If it is mine?”

Something in him struggled to say: “If
it is, why, then, I must—­But it
isn’t!” Maurice was, for the moment, a
horribly scared boy; his instinct was to run to cover
at any cost. He forgot Edith, coming home by
herself after Johnny should turn in at his own gate;
he was conscious only of his need to be alone to think
this thing out and decide what he must do. There
was no possible privacy in the house. “If
I go up to our room,” he thought, frantically,
“Eleanor’ll burst in on me, and then she’ll
get on to it that there’s something the matter!”
Suddenly he remembered the chicken coop. “It’s
late. Edith won’t be coming in.”
So he skulked around behind the house and the stable,